Suharto Quotes

Good times make bad policy. —Mohammad Sadli, economic adviser to Indonesia’s General Suharto2

Above all, Suharto had been hunting down communists, presumed communists, suspected communists, possible communists, highly unlikely communists, and the odd innocent person.

Berkeley Mafia,” a set of economists trained at the University of California who worked with Suharto.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

But we know that whatever it was, Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation. The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.

Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf concluded in 2010: "We already know that the earthquake of the past few years has damaged Western economies, while leaving those of emerging countries, particularly Asia, standing. It has also destroyed Western prestige. The West has dominated the world economically and intellectually for at least two centuries. That epoch is now over. Hitherto, the rulers of emerging countries disliked the West's pretensions, but respected its competence. This is true no longer. Never again will the West have the sole word." I was reminded of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. When Asian economies were devastated by similarly foolish borrowing the West – including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – prescribed bitter medicine. They extolled traditional free market principles: Asia should raise interest rates to support sagging currencies, while state spending, debt, subsidies should be cut drastically. Banks and companies in trouble should be left to fail, there should be no bail-outs. South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia were pressured into swallowing the bitter medicine. President Suharto paid the ultimate price: he was forced to resign. Anger against the IMF was widespread. I was in Los Angeles for a seminar organised by the Claremont McKenna College to discuss, among other things, the Asian crisis. The Thai speaker resorted to profanity: F-- the IMF, he screamed. The Asian press was blamed by some Western academics. If we had the kind of press freedoms the West enjoyed, we could have flagged the danger before the crisis hit. Western credibility was torn to shreds when the financial tsunami struck Wall Street. Shamelessly abandoning the policy prescriptions they imposed on Asia, they decided their banks and companies like General Motors were too big to fail. How many Asian countries could have been spared severe pain if they had ignored the IMF? How vain was their criticism of the Asian press, for the almost unfettered press freedoms the West enjoyed had failed to prevent catastrophe.

Procurar-se-á em vão na Carta das Nações Unidas o fundamento da autoridade reclamada por Washington para usar a força e a violência com vistas à consecução do “interesse nacional”, tal como definido pelas pessoas imortais que lançam sobre a sociedade essa sombra chamada “política”, na evocativa frase de John Dewey. O U.S. Code define muito claramente o crime de “terrorismo”, para o qual a legislação prevê severas penas. Mas não encontraremos nenhuma frase que exima de punição “os arquitetos do poder” por suas práticas de terror de Estado, para não falar de seus monstruosos clientes (visto que desfrutam das boas graças de Washington): Suharto, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu, Noriega e outros, grandes e pequenos. Como denunciam, ano após ano, as principais organizações de direitos humanos, praticamente toda a ajuda externa americana é ilegal, do principal recebedor até o último da lista, porque a lei proíbe ajuda a países que praticam a “tortura sistemática”. A lei pode ser essa, mas qual será o seu significado?

Between economic growth and stable democracy The correlation between development and democracy was first noted by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in the late 1950s, and ever since then there have been many studies linking development to democracy.25 The relationship between growth and democracy may not be linear—that is, more growth does not necessarily always produce more democracy. The economist Robert Barro has shown that the correlation is stronger at lower levels of income and weaker at middle levels.26 One of the most comprehensive studies of the relationship between development and democracy shows that transitions into democracy from autocracy can occur at any level of development but are much less likely to be reversed at higher levels of per capita GDP.27 Whereas growth appears to favor stable democracy, the reverse causal connection between democracy and growth is much less clear. This stands to reason if we simply consider the number of authoritarian countries that have piled up impressive growth records over recent years—South Korea and Taiwan while they were ruled dictatorially, the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Thus, while having a coherent state and reasonably good governance is a condition for growth, it is not clear that democracy plays the same positive role.

The Dayaks had once been known as the headhunters of Borneo. They believed that if you chopped off the head of your enemy and ate his liver, you received his strength. That old, traditional, animistic belief still flourished—never addressed because under Suharto, discussing issues of race, religion, or ethnicity was banned. It was too “emotional,” too contentious, and in a society where order was largely imposed by the military, it was “unnecessary” to discuss and debate contentious issues because it only made things worse.

supposed to be doing, and unsure whether the troops were friend or foe, they offered little resistance. They were quickly overpowered and taken away.56 By evening the movement

The frequency of Suharto’s meetings with his fellow heads of government during his twenty-two-year incumbency prompted an Indonesian label for the encounters: “empat mata” (four eyes).

I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franc's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. […] Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

The lowest among the advanced liberal democracies were France (6.7), Belgium (6.6) and Italy (5.5). At or below two were Bangladesh (0.4), Nigeria (1.0), Uganda (1.9), Indonesia (1.9), Bolivia (2.0), Kenya (2.0) and Cameroon (2.0). Meanwhile, Russia and Pakistan were on 2.3, India on 2.7, China on 3.5, Brazil on 4.0.25 There is, as one might expect, strong evidence that corruption impairs economic growth. Nobody wants to invest or do the other growth-promoting things discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 in a highly corrupt country.26 Yet all corruption is not equal in its effects. Analysts distinguish centralized from decentralized corruption. Under centralized corruption, one person determines the size of the take. Call this Suharto’s Indonesia. Under decentralized corruption, officials and politicians compete for the take. Call this India.